Book Reviews

“If the disaster can be said to be unevenly distributed,” one of M. John Harrison’s hapless characters writes: “Brentford is one of the places it has been distributed to.” Harrison’s characters exist on the edge, though they are never exactly sure what it is the edge of. On one side is something that passes for […]

The Hammer of God was not quite the last solo novel that Arthur C. Clarke wrote (that honour goes to 3001, The Final Odyssey), but it could lay claim to being the worst solo novel he wrote. It’s an expansion of a short story, also called “The Hammer of God”, that came out the year before, […]

Good grief, we’re already close to the end of the year. And November sees something of a lull in sf publishing. Certainly there are fewer books that have caught our eye than in recent months. But the list still includes a couple of real biggies. Shadow Sun Seven by Spencer Ellsworth First up is a […]

Let’s face it, when you talk about sf it’s all too easy to limit the discussion to the usual suspects: mostly Americans, a few Brits, and the occasional Canadian (who has probably been mistaken for an American). But there’s a whole world of science fiction out there, which can too often slip by unnoticed. True, […]

And the list continues. Let’s start with what is probably the most eagerly awaited novel this month. Provenance by Ann Leckie Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy earned her just about every sf award going, so her first standalone novel has to be of interest. Ingray’s home planet is in political turmoil, interstellar war is spreading, […]

September is shaping up to be a month for the big names, with new books from Ann Leckie, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Dave Hutchinson among others. And that’s not counting the oddities of international publishing, which sees Adam Roberts’s new novel, The Real-Town Murders out in the UK this month, but not out in America […]

1968 marked something of a sea change in the life and career of Arthur C. Clarke. Before that date, he was one of the giants of science fiction, though the iconoclasts of the New Wave were already identifying him as one of the dinosaurs whose time was past. To a probably lesser extent he was […]

Sometimes, the way we read a book depends on how it is presented to us. If we are told that a novel is a psychological thriller, that is what we expect to read; if we are told that it is science fiction, then we will read it differently. The joy of Nina Allan’s second novel, […]

So, the other day we told you about some of the books coming your way in July. But that wasn’t even half of the books we’ve got our eyes on for the hot summer month. So here are more books to look forward to. Arabella and the Battle of Venus by David D. Levine David […]

We’re coming up on the half way point of the year. Already? Where did it go? And there used to be a time when publishers drifted off to Mediterranean beaches or Tuscan villas around this time of year, so it was something of a fallow time for new books. Well, there were always plenty of […]

Reports of a strange, new habitable planet have reached the Twenty Planets of human civilization. When a team of scientists is assembled to investigate this world, exoethnologist Sara Callicot is recruited to keep an eye on an unstable crewmate.